"Broken Temporalities of the 'New' South Africa" : A Variegated Rainbow Nation in K. Sello Duiker's The quiet vilence of dreams and Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to Our Hillbrow (Vol. XII, 2019: 1-32)

Abstract

Post-apartheid South African literature examines a country which has a history of racial violence engendered by apartheid, and the resultant ambivalent cultural identities. In this article, K. Sella Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams and Phaswane Mpe 's Welcome to Our Hlillbrow are examined as novels which envisage the confusion and vulnerability of the South African youth arising out of broken homes occasioned by the apartheid past and living through a disorienting present. Focusing on fractured narratives of individual disorientation of characters, the article reads the embrace of an expressive subculture as an attempt by the youth to /it into the economic, social, cultural and political uncertainties in the Rainbow nation. The article builds on the confluence of race and class in the social formation of post-apartheid South Africa to illuminate youth unsettlement and disappointment with the transition